Avoiding the "huge INBOX of death"

[Raphaël Fournier-S'niehotta]

Hello fellow notmuchers,

I am a longtime "classic" mutt user, willing to switch to a notmuch-based
solution (probably neomutt). However, as far as I understand, I will have to
deal with a "huge INBOX of death", as put by Anarcat in a recent blog post [1],
that when all emails remain in a single maildir, which may the become very
large. 

I would like to avoid this, for quota reasons on my work imap server first, and
also because I sometimes have to use webmail access, with poor searching
capabilities.

Thus, I think I need to have my emails sorted into maildir folders according to
the notmuch tags. Namely, emails with the "inbox" tag should stay in the INBOX
maildir, those with "archive" should be moved to Archives (all synchronized with
the server). As a bonus, it would be great to have a few more features, like
"mails in Archives older than 6 months are moved to Archives/<year>" (kept
locally and not stored on the server).

As far as I understand, "afew" and its MailMover feature could be useful for my
case, but it does not seem currently maintained (plus, very few mentions of it
on the notmuch archives) and Michael Turquette said it's buggy [2], so I would
like more feedback to be sure before letting it mess with my maildir.

Another tool that could be useful is the "maildir-notmuch-sync" script written
by Ethan Schoonover and adapted by Michael Turquette [3]. However, it seems
dedicated to handling the synchronization of Gmail labels, not a generic imap
server hierarchy.

Perhaps there is another solution to deal with this in a notmuch-based setup, I
would very much like any of your feedback.

[1]: https://anarc.at/blog/2016-05-12-email-setup/
[2]: http://deferred.io/2016/01/17/state-of-the-dotfiles.html
[3]: http://deferred.io/2016/01/18/notmuch-tags-gmail-labels-bidirectional-sync.html

-- 
Raphaël Fournier-S'niehotta
http://raphael.fournier-sniehotta.fr/apropos